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Eggs Aren’t People

It is so rare to hear a Republican presidential candidate defy the extreme right on social issues that I had to take notice of Jon Huntsman’s opposition to “personhood” activists.

The Utah governor said on Meet the Press that a proposed amendment to the Mississippi constitution, which would declare a fertilized egg to be a person under the law, “goes too far.”

Too far? That’s putting it mildly.

Let’s start with this simple medical fact: Only about half of fertilized eggs ever become implanted. It’s hard to imagine personhooders claiming that a woman whose body fails to implant a fertilized egg is a criminal. But their nutty amendment does seem to rule out abortion under all circumstances, including rape or incest, or in the case of an ectopic pregnancy that could kill the pregnant woman, along of course, with the implanted egg.

The amendment could also result in a ban of birth control pills and intrauterine devices, since they disrupt implantation. According to the Guttmacher Institute, at a national level that sort of restriction would affect around 11 million women who use the pill, and another 2 million who use IUD’s.

Predictably, Mr. Huntsman went on to say disturbing things about a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her life and her health. He asserted that he is pro-life and that he has “two little adopted girls to prove the point.” What on earth does that mean?

And he said, like Mr. Barbour, that he believes life begins at conception – the point of implantation. That’s only marginally better, since women generally don’t know for four to six weeks that they are pregnant, and banning abortion at conception would effectively mean banning the procedure entirely.

The Supreme Court decided this issue nearly 40 years ago but far too many politicians find it a good way to keep voters divided and to denigrate the values of their opponents. So far only one state, Colorado, has voted on one of these ridiculous personhood amendments, and rejected it. I hope Mississippi will be next.